Why (most) entrepreneurs don’t have college degrees and (some) blonde women are dumb

If you’ve ever had a really good-looking girl in your high school, you probably noticed that she can say the dumbest things in the world, and yet no one would correct her. Men would simply stare at her ‘eyes’, and women would giggle. While regular, average looking people get corrected, beautiful blond women don’t, and they still get along in life, and never stop to wonder why things don’t add up (sometimes literally) .

The same can be said about entrepreneurs, albeit a bit different. I participated in an interesting panel in NYC for MBA graduates with Ran Harnevo, Adam Singolda and Idan Cohen, the CEOs and founders of 5min Media (Now AOL Video), Taboola, Boxee and eToro, respectively. You can read more about the panel in Hebrew here.

One of the questions the host asked us on stage was what courses we would recommend to MBA students. After an awkward silence Ran took the microphone and said that’s not a good question to ask him, as he doesn’t have an undergraduate degree, and the rest of the panel quickly joined in saying they don’t have either undergraduate nor graduate degree. All participants are extremely smart, extremely successful people, that never needed any type of formal education.

Ran wrote a post (in Hebrew) about a very interesting following up on a post by Fred Wilson, and asked 13 top start-up CEO’s whether they have college degrees, to find out 8 of the 13 don’t.

Conclusion – You don’t need a college degree if you can build a Multi Million Dollar start-up, or good-looking enough to marry someone who can.

Like everything else, education as we know it will change with the internet. Companies like skillshare will distribute and democratize it, so you can learn anything from anywhere and (possibly) get a degree in it from the internet, much like earning points in FarmVille.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with something original.”
–Sir Ken Robinson